Legal Empowerment

Our legal empowerment work ensures that resilient and self-governing indigenous peoples and forest peoples are aware of their rights can effectively use customary, national and international legal systems to defend those rights. This involves supporting them to strengthen their own legal systems, and providing legal and human rights training that empowers them to develop their own legal strategies and to engage effectively in national, regional and international legal processes to defend their rights.

Indigenous peoples and forest peoples are increasingly designing and implementing their own legal strategies, articulating their own legal frameworks and regulations, and developing mechanisms and procedures to protect themselves against rights violations. They are also initiating and participating in legal and quasi-legal complaints and proactively driving the implementation of successful legal decisions. In parallel, there is a growing number of indigenous legal practitioners and increasing demand among indigenous peoples and forest peoples for legal and human rights training.  

The aim of our legal empowerment work is to ensure that indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ and aware of their collective and individual human rights and can effectively use customary, national and international legal systems to defend them and to strengthen their resilience and self-governing capacity.  

Building on long-term relationships with indigenous peoples and forest peoples, and in collaboration with networks of local lawyers and partners, we work to ensure legal strategies are designed and directed by indigenous peoples and forest peoples and are rooted in their visions and aspirations.  

A key part of FPP’s work is providing technical assistance to indigenous peoples and forest peoples to support, develop, and strengthen their own legal instruments and systems, which are integral to territorial governance. For example, indigenous peoples and afro-descendant peoples we support in Colombia have established protocols and laws on consultation and free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) and obtained Constitutional Court recognition of their validity, established their own forest guards and are developing strategies to prevent gender discrimination and realise gender justice. They have also developed community-level regulations and mechanisms, such as codifying rules on natural resource usage or developing membership databases, that are necessary for them to realise their self-determined visions for the future.

We work in solidarity with diverse and respectful allies to expand indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ knowledge of the law and their capacity to effectively use it. This involves knowledge sharing and network building between people within and across countries, including by facilitating legal learning exchanges and trainings. We facilitate people-to-people exchanges to share their legal strategies and experiences and to develop joint and mutually supportive actions to demand respect for their rights. Our work also involves providing training to lawyers who support indigenous peoples and forest peoples and engaging with the judiciary at national and regional levels to increase their awareness of indigenous peoples and forest peoples’ rights under international law as well as their realities on the ground.

For example, FPP supports the Peoples’ Legal School in Peru, in which lawyers and law students – most of whom are indigenous – are trained in crucial topics related to indigenous peoples’ rights. This school trained its sixth cohort in 2023 and has expanded to include regional schools. We also supported gatherings of indigenous guards from Colombia and Peru to share experiences and lessons with a view to "stop being governed and to start governing". In Indonesia, we supported communities to convene at the national level to develop strategic litigation strategies, while in East Africa, we supported women-led community assemblies that included a strong focus on learning from each other’s legal strategies and successes and on dealing with setbacks, such as legal victories that are not implemented but are followed by harassment, criminalization, and further rights denial.